Questions Swirl Around $6 Billion Nuclear Lab

SANTA FE, N.M. (AP) - At Los Alamos National Laboratory, scientists and engineers refer to their planned new $6 billion nuclear lab by its clunky acronym, CMRR, short for Chemistry Metallurgy Research Replacement Facility.
But as a work in progress for three decades and with hundreds of
millions of dollars already spent, nomenclature is among the minor
issues.

Questions continue to
swirl about exactly what kind of nuclear and plutonium research will be
done there, whether the lab is really necessary, and — perhaps most
important — will it be safe, or could it become New Mexico's equivalent of Japan's Fukushima?

As
federal officials prepare the final design plans for the controversial
and very expensive lab, increased scrutiny is being placed on what in
recent years has been discovered to be a greater potential for a major
earthquake along the fault lines that have carved out the stunning
gorges, canyons and valleys that surround the nation's premier nuclear
weapons facility in northern New Mexico.

Final
preparations for the lab — whose the high-end price tag estimate of
$5.8 billion is almost $1 billion more than New Mexico's annual state
budget and more than double the lab's annual budget — also comes as a
cash-strapped Congress
looks to trim defense spending and cut cleanup budgets at contaminated
facilities like Los Alamos. It also comes as the inspector general
recommends that the federal government consider consolidating its
far-flung network of research labs.

Despite
the uncertainty, the National Nuclear Safety Administration, an arm of
the Department of Energy that oversees the nation's nuclear labs, is
moving forward on final designs for the lab. Project director Herman
Le-Doux says it has been redesigned with input from the nation's leading
seismic experts, and the NNSA has "gone to great extremes" to ensure the planned building could withstand an earthquake of up to 7.3 magnitude.

Most
seismic experts agree that would be a worst-case scenario for the area.
But many people who live near the lab — and have seen it twice
threatened by massive wildfires in 10 years — see no reason for taking
the chance.

"The Department of
Energy has learned nothing from the Fukushima disaster," said David
McCoy, director of the environmental and nuclear watchdog group Citizens
Action New Mexico, at a recent oversight hearing. That's become a
common refrain since last year's earthquake and tsunami in Japan caused a
meltdown at one of its nuclear plants. "The major lesson of Fukushima
is ignored by NNSA: Don't build dangerous facilities in unsafe natural
settings."

Lab officials say CMRR is needed
to replace a 1940s era facility that is beyond renovation yet crucial to
supporting its mission as the primary center for maintaining and
developing the country's stockpile of nuclear weapons.
While much of the work is classified, they insist the lab's mission is
to do analytical work to support the nearby Plutonium Facility, or PF-4,
which is the only building in the country equipped for making the pits
that power nuclear weapons.

Watchdog
groups, however, call it an effort by the DOE and NNSA to escalate the
production of new nuclear weapons and turn what has largely been a
research facility into a bomb factory.

And
they are not giving up their efforts to halt the project. The Los
Alamos Study Group, headed by Greg Mello, one of a number of area
activists who have made a career out of monitoring LANL, has two
lawsuits challenging the project and what he says is the federal
government's refusal to look at alternatives despite the increased
seismic threats uncovered in 2007 that have sent the price tag soaring.

Mello
spends his days poring over every available public document on Los
Alamos and the nation's nuclear program. And he makes frequent trips to
Washington to lobby against funding for CMRR, which he says is an
unnecessary attempt to "open the door for an overall expansion in
intensity and scale" of the nation's nuclear weapons program.

At
just about every public hearing related to the labs, Mello lines up
with a regular group of aging hippies, retired scientists, former lab
employees, residents of nearby pueblos as well as housewives and
grandmothers from Santa Fe and other neighboring communities to oppose
CMRR and anything and everything related to an expansion or continuation
of the nuclear mission at Los Alamos.

While
much of the public outcry over Los Alamos in recent years has focused
on lagging cleanup efforts of radioactive waste and hazardous runoff
into the canyons that drain into the Rio Grande, earthquake danger and
the potential for catastrophic releases of radiation from existing
facilities was front and center at a recent meeting in Santa Fe of the
Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board, appointed by Congress to
oversee the nation's nuclear facilities.

"The
board believes that no safety issue problem in (the nation's nuclear
complex) is more pressing than the plutonium facility's vulnerability to
a large earthquake," the board's chairman, Peter Winokur said in reference to efforts to reinforce PF-4.

The
board has worked closely with NNSA to ensure CMRR is designed to
withstand a major quake, so Winokur said the board is not concerned
about that project — "as long as they follow through."

It's that follow through that has watchdogs concerned.

"Los
Alamos doesn't have that safety ethos needed for a facility that will
store the bulk of the nation's stockpile of plutonium," Mello said

Winokur agreed that safety remains a concern at the lab.

Since
the last contractor took over operations in 2006, he said, "It's fair
to say they have improved safety at the sites." But he pointed to two
recent memos about deficiencies in nuclear safety programs that he said
underscore the fact "that the operations out there are very challenging
and that there is plenty of room for improvement."

Asked
if he thought it was wise to spend billions of dollars to keep the
nation's nuclear weapons operations centered on an earthquake-prone
mesa, Winokur said his mandate from Congress is to oversee safety, not
second guess major policy decisions.

"I'll
leave that to Congress and DOE about whether or not they want to build a
facility of that nature in that region of the country where they do
have a fairly large earthquake threat," Winokur said.

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